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Delano Wingfield, 22, has been grilling up food and cleaning dishes at Roti Mediterranean Grill in Washington D.C.’s Union Station for almost a year. Struggling to get by on $9 an hour, he started encouraging coworkers to strike with him. His manager found out, he said, and slashed his hours.

“It was hard with 35 hours, and now I don’t know what I’m about to do with the 20 hours they gave me,” he said Wednesday. “I’m out here to make myself and everyone else more money.” (Wingfield’s manager did not respond to a request for comment.)

In a speech last July, President Obama vowed that “whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.” On Wednesday, an estimated 175 workers who serve food, sell mementos or do maintenance work in federal buildings in Washington D.C. went on strike for the day. Instead of showing up at their jobs, they showed up in front of the White House, where they urged President Obama to live up to his word.

It’s their fifth strike in five months, but the workers of Good Jobs Nation didn’t seem the least bit tired this morning. Low-paid employees from the food courts of federal buildings, the gift shops of the Smithsonian, and others employed under federal contracts, concessions, and lease agreements donned matching t-shirts, picked up signs and marched to the White House.

Here’s an easy way for the government to save about $7 billion a year: Tighten the cap on the lavish salaries paid to executives at government contractors.

The cap is currently at $760,000 per contract per executive per year. That’s almost 15 times greater than the average household income – meaning that the federal government is helping to worsen the same income inequality President Obama has decried.

Courtney Shackleford is one of two entry-level employees at the Ben and Jerry’s in Washington, D.C.,’s Union Station, where she makes $8.25 an hour. Like many workers in America’s growing low-wage economy, she struggles to make ends meet: Between her pregnancy and her tuition fees at Trinity Washington University, Shackleford doesn’t make enough to cover basic expenses.

America's huge income gaps are routinely described as inavoidable, thanks to large structural forces like globalization and technological change. Skilled labor has become worth more, unskilled labor is worth less, and that's that. 

Of course, though, we know that story is incomplete. Any number of public policies have also fanned inequality, like giving big tax breaks to the rich, and any number of policies could help close the income gap. 

Molly Ball has a long piece in The Atlantic on "The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas." 

NEW YORK, NY – Following the Census Bureau’s release of poverty numbers verifying the country’s growing income gap, national public policy center Demos has published a new report illustrating how the federal government promotes inequality through its contracting policies.

Cleaning and concessions workers plan to walk off their jobs in federal buildings Wednesday and march on the White House, where they’ll demand President Obama wield his executive authority to raise the labor standards for their taxpayer-funded jobs. Organizers expect turnout for the work stoppage to outstrip the fledgling union-backed group’s first strike May 21, which drew just over a hundred Washington, DC workers. [...]